David Bowie – from station to (metro) station to museum restaurant

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Introducing Rakewell, Apollo’s wandering eye on the art world. Look out for regular posts taking a rakish perspective on art and museum stories.

David Bowie, who regularly played at a club in Aylesbury in the early 1970s, is something of a local legend in the Buckinghamshire town: indeed, some residents are so enamoured of his connection to the place that they have semi-seriously proposed renaming it ‘Aylesbowie’.

Recently, a statue of Bowie has been erected in the town. Alas, said monument has received mixed reviews – some rather more pointed than others. Within 48 hours of its unveiling, the work was vandalised by a would-be sculpture critic bearing a can of spray paint. Photos show the divisive statue daubed with the slogans ‘RIP DB’ and ‘Feed the homeless first’.

On the other side of the Atlantic, the Starman’s posthumous reputation is faring rather better. To celebrate the arrival of the ‘David Bowie Is…’ exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum, the Metropolitan Transit Authority of New York released a series of limited edition MetroCards bearing the singer’s likeness earlier this month. Known as ‘tickets to Mars’, the transport tickets attracted huge crowds of New Yorkers to the Broadway-Lafayette subway station, the walls of which have been transformed into a Bowie exhibition venue by music streaming service Spotify. Station to Station indeed.

At the Brooklyn Museum itself, the restaurant is hosting Bowie-themed monthly dinners that will apparently ‘explore the four major phases of [Bowie’s] work’, delving into the cuisines of the cities that inspired him. It’s certainly a novel idea, but given that the singer himself was reported to have subsisted on a diet of milk, red peppers and cocaine for much of the 1970s, diners may be well advised to fill up on bread…